On Monday morning, Graham looked at his face in the mirror. He held his comb under the running tap and then slicked it through his hair. It ignored the comb and stayed resolutely wayward, especially the cowlick at his forehead. ‘Dittybopping hair,’ Graham said to himself. Dittybopping was an air force term that meant a soldier who was marching out of time with his unit. Graham watched a lot of movies with pilots in them. Pilots, planes, airports. Flight. He tried one last time to smooth his hair, and then gave up, tossing the comb back into the top drawer, helpfully labelled GRAHAM by Geraldine. He gazed into the mirror. With his big, bright blue eyes and slight overbite and that hair, Graham looked bewildered most of the time. As though what he saw when he looked about him was contrary to his expectations. As it was. That Banville still existed, day after day, perplexed him. People kept having babies, his sisters more than anyone – the Knight girls had always been breeders. People married, cattle was bought and sold, men clutched at handfuls of lanolin-moist wool with the ewe braced between their legs and shore off the tangle to bare the squirming white body underneath. Crops grew in promising shoots and then the rain didn’t come, and didn’t come, and still didn’t come, so the earth cracked in crooked schisms and the shoots disappeared back into the ground. A thousand cups of tea were over-brewed and stewed and drunk nonetheless. Watery beef casserole was ladled onto plates and people ate it, dragging hunks of bread through it to mop up the sauce and wash it down with briny tank water. There were first kisses, sweet whispers in the musty paper-scented shelves of the library, and there were last kisses, wrinkled hands laid across wrinkled brows in the iodine-scented dusk of the sick room. And more babies were born, and it started again. The whole mess of it just kept happening, over and over again. For the life of him, Graham couldn’t see what made them keep at it so. It was like there was a magnetic field in the soil here that drew people to it. A virus that infected people and made them want to stay. For the farmers, he guessed it was the weight of tradition. Tradition and bequests. Graham was not a farmer and had not come from farming stock. His father had managed the bank in the main street for thirty years. Graham did not stay for the land; he would not inherit a thousand head of cattle or forty acres of shimmering wheat. For him it was just happenstance. He was here because a lazy flick from the hand of fate had thwarted his route to somewhere else. Like an Australian Bermuda Triangle, Banville was just the patch of the earth that sucked him to it.
‘A bit slow,’ the people of Banville said of Graham, tapping their fingers on their temples and grimacing.
Not nearly slow enough, thought Graham when he overheard them. But really, it suited him for them to think that. Then he could behave how he liked. And often that meant completely ignoring all but a handful of Banville residents. Helpfully, his sisters perpetuated the rumours of his inherent stupidity. They were not numbered in that handful.
He brushed his teeth, waiting until enough foam had accumulated in his mouth to cover the sinkhole when he spat it out. He liked that. Cover it on up and the sink was an endless curve of white porcelain. Like eternity, pure and clean, even if just for a moment. He rinsed his mouth and straightened up for one last look in the mirror. He smiled at himself and buttoned the last button on his shirt so it was tightly fastened all the way up to his neck.
‘Just going out for a bit, Geraldine,’ he called.
He paused by the door, but she didn’t respond.
As Graham walked, he noticed something in the streetscape. There were hundreds, possibly even thousands of different shades of green. From one blade of grass to the next, one leaf to its neighbour, this one colour came in so many varieties it seems impossible that they could all coexist. Certainly trees and shrubs differed in hue, but it was more than that. Looking closely, it really seemed probable that no two leaves on a tree were exactly the same. Even though he found the plethora of green shades beautiful, Graham felt a little bit panicky at this thought, that the colour green may in fact be infinite. How could you know, then, when something could no longer be called green? And if a colour could be infinite, then what else could be infinite? Where were the edges of things, or did everything just bleed and merge into everything else?
On the other hand, it did present a whole new spectrum of possibilities. There could be no end to the manifestations of this one tone of beauty. It was funny how you could look at things over and over again, until one day you looked and you really saw them. Whatever the thing was. A person sometimes, who had always been there but one day was brought into focus, sharp and magnified. Full, glorious colour. And then there were others, and as soon as their particular arrangement of atoms met the lens of your eye and were imprinted on the retina, you saw them with your whole self, completely and utterly: you recognised them in some fundamental way. There had only ever been one person who Graham had seen like that.
He turned right at the corner and walked into Crossley Street. Mrs Montepulciano’s vegetables were looking quite impressive. She stood at the edge of her garden, hands on hips, her black hair pulled up in a tight bun below her triangular peasant-style gardening hat. When Graham stopped at the gate she beamed at him. He smiled back and pointed to the basket at her feet, crowded with her harvest. ‘Hello, again. Quite a bounty you have there.’
Mrs Montepulciano gestured at her tomato vine. ‘Tomorrow I can,’ she declared.
‘Can what?’
‘No, no, I can.’ She held up an invisible cylinder in her palm and shook it at Graham.
‘Ah.’ Graham raised his eyebrows but nodded, respectful. It was early for canning, but Mrs Montepulciano was never wrong about gardening matters. This was her domain; she was the matriarch reigning over her flourishing territory in bright purple gardening gloves. And she was one of that handful of people in Banville whom Graham liked.
He gestured to a pumpkin the size of his head slumbering on the ground near the compost bin.
‘Looks ripe,’ he offered.
Mrs Montepulciano scoffed. ‘Tursday, Friday. Maybe Satoday I pick.’
Graham nodded again. From her apron she withdrew two eggs, one white and one brown.
‘From Bella,’ she said, handing him the brown one, ‘and Stella,’ closing his hand over the white. She beamed again. ‘For you. Every day!’ She mimed laying an egg and Graham laughed and nodded at her before walking on. One minute later, he climbed the steps of the Vale house with an egg cloistered in each hand. He set them on the cane table next to the front door to free up his hands and, from his pocket, withdrew a key and slid it into the lock. He felt the unbending of his body that came with this action – pure relief. He took off his hat and opened the door.
‘Susannah?’ he called, and closed it behind him.